Christopher Nolan Took Some Artistic License. By Zeus’ Beard!

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 23, 2026

 

“See how they are wasting the estate, and doing dishonour to the wife, of one who is certain to return some day, and that, too, not long hence. Nay, he will be here soon; may heaven send you home quietly first that you may not meet with him in the day of his coming, for once he is here the suitors and he will not part bloodlessly.”

 

-The Odyssey, as translated by Samuel Butler

 

I confess that I am perplexed by the various casting controversies surrounding Christopher Nolan’s excellent and moving The Odyssey, a film inspired by Homer’s poem of that title. It is true that Nolan cast a black woman, Lupita Nyong’o, in the role of Helen of Troy, a Spartan queen who is not described as black (aithiopes, “burnt-faced,” from which the English Ethiopian is derived) in the original Greek and whom it would be implausible to present as black, given what we know of ancient Sparta’s citizenship laws, and whose blackness probably would have been noted by the Greeks, whose art and literature attest that they did notice that kind of thing. It also is true that a transgender actor is cast in the role of Sinon, the Greek soldier who plays a critical role in the affair of the Trojan horse. The whiny little men who complain about these things for a living have made a few other minor objections. Slate, that eternal arbiter of verisimilitude, commissioned one of those authority-asserting “I’m a military historian” essays, the author of which finds psychological value in the film but concedes: “On the matter of historical accuracy, the detractors are right. … When it comes to accurately depicting how the Greeks of the period armed themselves and fought, Nolan isn’t even trying.”

 

Well, raise my rent. Christopher Nolan evidently has taken some artistic license in telling a story about men and women who never actually lived and the war they never actually fought as related by an ancient oral tradition attributed to Homer, a poet who (probably) did not exist. I am not at all sure that a military historian is the person I would consult to evaluate a story about sea monsters and one-eyed giants and witches who (3,000-year-old spoiler alert!) turn men into pigs. In a mythological milieu in which the Greeks’ chief lightning guy turns himself into a swan to rape an entirely different Spartan queen (queen of Sparta is one of the toughest jobs in mythology), you’re telling me that the actor formerly known as Ellen Page cannot play the role of a scrawny Greek redshirt who gets left behind on the beach to take one for the team? If you’re going to complain about Sinon, maybe start with the fact that the character does not appear in the original Odyssey at all—he is imported from the Aeneid.

 

But why complain?

 

The acting is almost uniformly good and often excellent. The only casting reservation I would have is Benny Safdie in the role of Agamemnon: Safdie is himself a serious filmmaker (he and his brother are responsible for Uncut Gems, an outstanding piece of work), but his broad, open face and prep-school affect are far removed from bloody-minded Agamemnon, even if Nolan gives him very little to do other than stand there in a big black helmet and armor, lurking outside the gates of Troy looking more than a little like Darth Vader in that famous introductory scene.

 

If not Darth Vader, then, perhaps, Batman. There is more to the association than a cowl.

 

Nolan obviously has political ideas on his mind and has had for some time. The Dark Knight trilogy is full of political references, from considerations of ancient political questions (such as the ethics of using deceit in the public interest) to allusions to contemporary events, with much of The Dark Knight Rises deliberately echoing Doctor Zhivago. This version of the Odyssey concludes with the hero, universally lionized, coming to understand that, by violating the norms and taboos of his time in pursuit of a temporary victory that was to serve very little purpose beyond finally ending the decade-long siege and allowing the Greeks to go home, he has set in motion a series of conflicts of escalating barbarism that, the fragile bonds of civilization having been broken, will lead all of Greece into an age of darkness. The people sing his praises, but he ruefully acknowledges that his song will only be sung: “Songs will be all that they have to remember those of us who could write.”

 

Having visited Hades—what we see of it is filthy in Nolan’s vision—Odysseus knows what probably awaits him in eternity, and it isn’t the Elysian Fields. But it is this life and its troubles that command his attention. This is a secular Odysseus and a largely secular Odyssey—all we see of the gods is Odysseus’ private visions of Athena, which are, the film very strongly suggests, only delusion. Odysseus complains to Athena that the gods refuse to speak to men in a way that is plain and understandable, and she retorts that it is easy to understand thunder, blood, or pain. And that explains the metaphysics of the film in brief.

 

The Greeks, having been terrified by tales of the possibly mythical “people from the sea,” come to realize that these menaces are none other than their own lost heroes, desperately pillaging and foraging in support of their own bare survival, lurching blindly from shore to shore in their doomed attempt to find their way home. Odysseus is famously clever, but he is a clever monster even if he retains some religion and enough of a functional conscience—personified by Zendaya as Athena—to torment him. Beyond his sins, he is a monster in the most ancient sense of the word: a harbinger of things to come.

 

As a matter of history, as far as we know it, there was no Trojan War, at least as described in the Odyssey, though extended warfare leading to the collapse of Mediterranean trade did in fact announce a general collapse of Bronze Age Greek civilization, a catastrophe so complete that Greek writing (the system scholars call Linear B) did, in fact, disappear along with the political and economic conditions that had sustained it. The later collapse of Roman civilization would follow a similar pattern, with the vanishing of trade, the decline of the money economy and central administration, etc., leading to the Dark Ages. Things that were known became things that were forgotten—and it is easy to forget that the basic things can be forgotten. (But try asking an 18-year-old to write a paragraph in longhand.) Nolan’s script presents the Trojan War as fundamentally a matter of economic competition, with the abduction of Helen providing a pretext for a preemptive war to establish control of trade routes. Escalating rounds of political-religious norm-breaking driven in no small part by opportunism and by resentments related to trade: One need not be an esoteric Straussian to read between those lines.

 

Nolan’s references to contemporary political anguish are not put forward in the clumsy and stupid way of, say, the Star Wars prequels; Nolan here is, if anything, both more direct and more deft than he is in handling the political themes of his Batman movies. There is, I suspect, a perverse reason for that: Movie-going Americans know their mythology, provided that mythology comes from comic books, and Nolan could play with Batman’s characters and situations only so much without taking audiences out of Gotham and into the insipidity of our current political contests. But Greek mythology? Nolan can get away with a great deal where that is concerned—who is going to nitpick, other than a few irrelevant weird race obsessives who are irritated, or pretend to be irritated, by the presence of Lupita Nyong’o? And maybe a few people who remember their childhood reading of Edith Hamilton.

 

The Odyssey is in that sense not exactly a blank canvas but a reasonably open field of play for Nolan. The field is so open and so inviting, in fact, that the film’s few slightly laborious moments are those in which Nolan is servicing the literature majors: He might have combined the scene with Polyphemus (the cyclops) and the Laestrygonians (the armored, cannibal giants) into a single episode and achieved much the same effect, perhaps a more powerful and concentrated effect, without imposing on audiences yet another scene of Odysseus and his men running away screaming. I know that part of the effect he is going for is the agony of attrition, but there is maybe a bit more of it than there needs to be. It is not that the film is too long—though it is long—but if it wants anything, it is a bit more variety and richness in color. But perhaps there is a point in the repetition, too: “There will be killing until the score is paid,” Homer promises.

 

Odysseus, like Jacob, is a deceiver, but he was the father of no nation, and instead dies at the hand of one of his own sons, if the account in the lost sequel poem is to be believed. (“Believed.”) The old French kings claimed to be descended from Priam of Troy through the Trojan refugees, and Aeneas was the great ancestor of Rome. Poor old Odysseus has only Lisbon (Olisipo) to his credit. But, Hollywood being Hollywood and entertainment—our tawdry little modern mythologies—having largely subsumed real life, having Matt Damon play you in the movie is a kind of afterlife, and more pleasant than the one Nolan imagines.